what linux version do people use for their CarPC

i'm still new in the area of CarPC's, but i'm looking into building a custom in the next month or so.

anyways, i use Ubuntu linux on my laptop (athlon 64 edition) and fedora on my desktop and i was wondering what version (either of these, or another) i should use in a carPC...I also have WinXP Pro Cd's lying around here too, if that would be better

of note: i plan on using a touchscreen (haven't decided which one yet)

For a tight dedicated system, Gentoo is the way to go. DSL is a good choice if you plan on building an embedded or "pseudo-embedded" system. I use SuSE on most of my desktops but I wouldn't recommend it for a car PC.

The system in my car is running Gentoo, and was previously running a stripped-down SuSE 9.3. The difference in stability is substantial - mainly related to the fact I'm using a customised vanilla 2.6.13 kernel now instead of the stock SuSE kernel (and modules). Although that doesn't relate specifically to Gentoo, the fact that everything is natively compiled does, and it _does_ make a differrence, both in a (very slight but noticable) speed increase, and a definite jump in stability, which in a car PC is paramount.

Although the install for Gentoo is easily an order of magnitude longer than for many of the other distros like SuSE et al, the payback is worth it.

The payback is not only in stability or speed, but getting a deeper understanding of linux itself and knowing EXACTLY what is loaded and what is running on the system.

P.S. It is also fun to get aggressive with the make.conf file, but that gets very dangerous

Speaking of make.conf, I got distcc working (unrelated to my car PC though) on 3 dual-Xeon workhorses for doing all the emerges for a recent install - way cool. I was able to tweak it to 21 simultaneous compilations (-j21). Except for the configures and links that are done locally, man does that ever fly. Now if I only had that at home...

Time how long it takes to do an "emerge kde-meta", if it takes less than an hour (assuming the files are predownloaded) I'll be impressed

If it takes significantly less, I'll be extremely impressed

I did that on my machine (and later regretted it, and installed by package) and it took an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Original 130nm, 2GHz) with 1 Gig of RAM just over 5 hours, including downloading the packages on a 5 MBit connection

One question, even on a 6 CPU's isn't 21 a bit much, I would think 18 *might* give better performance. Just because it seems -j3 on a single CPU is about as far as it can go, however I don't have practice with distcc.

I don't try to compile with distcc on an xbox, carpc, nslu2 and my PC.

Time how long it takes to do an "emerge kde-meta", if it takes less than an hour (assuming the files are predownloaded) I'll be impressed

If it takes significantly less, I'll be extremely impressed

Unfortunately most of the time is taken up by the individual configure scripts to run for each package that are all done locally of course. The downloads are almost non-consequential with a dedicated 100 MBit connection (except for of course how fast the mirror is and everything in-between). Many of the downloads are actually extremely small too.

Originally Posted by Jagaer

I did that on my machine (and later regretted it, and installed by package) and it took an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Original 130nm, 2GHz) with 1 Gig of RAM just over 5 hours, including downloading the packages on a 5 MBit connection

On any reasonbly quick machine the times for "kde-meta" are going to be about the same because of all the individual configures that take forever. Even with ganging the compiles, although I didn't actually time it (let it run and went home), I would hazard a guess it wasn't a whole lot better that what you did on your fast AMD system. Compiling my own projects is extremely fast though - a 5 minute local compile takes about 30 seconds.

Originally Posted by Jagaer

One question, even on a 6 CPU's isn't 21 a bit much, I would think 18 *might* give better performance. Just because it seems -j3 on a single CPU is about as far as it can go, however I don't have practice with distcc.

You're probably right. I didn't spend alot of time tweaking. I just wanted to see how well distcc worked for the most part. Since then, I've found that 18 is a pretty good number with the servers I have available, including the local CPU.

Originally Posted by Jagaer

I don't try to compile with distcc on an xbox, carpc, nslu2 and my PC.

I'm guessing that would be an exercise in futility

Originally Posted by Jagaer

Lastly, why the hell do you have 3 servers?

They are servers at work, not at home unfortunately We do alot of data processing and mass storage of satellite (remote sensing) data where I work. Most of our RAIDs are in the 3 to 10TB range, and we have two 1PB (Peta=1 million GB) tape robots. I don't think I have that many MP3s yet